‘Unlocking Us’: Analyzing the US election and its aftermath

Abstract

The American presidential election of 2020 ended in the early hours of Thursday 7 January 2021, when the US Congress counted and certified the ballots of the Electoral College in the aftermath of a violent, Trump-supporting mob breaching the US Capitol. The spectacle of this assault may be analyzed for years to come, yet it is immediately clear that it was the result of authoritarian impulses on the part of the defeated president. Critical Leadership Studies has concerned itself with the ‘problematization’ of leadership theory, often examining distributions of power both within society and within the discipline itself. This article takes its title from Brené Brown’s podcast, ‘Unlocking Us’, torqueing it in an effort to understand these events and their causes as a group dynamic that manifested between Trump and his supporters. I also make the argument that the anxiety fomented and falsely contained by Trump has its deeper origins in what Kuhn labeled ‘paradigm shifts’. To deconstruct the kind of leadership that took place in the run-up to and the aftermath of the 2020 election—darkly charismatic, authoritarian, and cultish—I employ three lenses of analysis: paradigm shifts as progenitors of crisis; ‘basic assumption’ patterns of work avoidance in groups; and ‘holding environments’ as the imposition of salutary boundaries that foster growth. In combination, these three lenses offer an interpretation of recent events in America that enhances the dialectical approach proposed by Critical Leadership Theory.

It is time to use the F word about Trump: Fascism, populism and the rebirth of history

“…The sense of absolute conviction that is then developed, combined with intense identification with a leader (a puzzle to many who have been baffled by the hold that Trump has over his followers) is strongly reminiscent of organizations that are generally defined as cults (Hassan, 2019). In line with this, Chace (2021: 365) described Trump’s leadership in the run up to the 2020 election as ‘darkly charismatic, authoritarian, and cultish.’ Mason (2021: 44) cites a 1930s historian, Lucie Varga, on the similarities between fascist identification and religious conversion, which certainly seems to describe the cultic dynamics within much of the MAGA movement:‘a group of people in dynamic despair, for whom life in the old framework, according to the old scale of values, has lost all meaning. At the bottom of the despair and solitude lies the illusion of a golden age and the nostalgia of a paradise lost.…”

Editorial transitions: Hail and farewell

“…Ladkin, 2022 – see also a special issue on racism and leadership, in February 2021), the COVID pandemic (e.g. Wilson, 2020, and other articles in the Special Issue in which it was published), the destructive rise and role of Donald Trump (Chace, 2021) and much more. Leadership studies, and management studies in general come to that, has been slow on the uptake on all these matters (see also Harley and Fleming, 2021).…”